Archive for December, 2006

When you start anything new the easiest way to keep it going is by getting into a routine. Whether it be a diet, exercise, or school work, a routine is the best way to keep yourself doing it.

Routines help because it allows our mind to go on autopilot and not get sidetracked. If we work into our schedule that everyday at 5 pm we are to meet Cindy or Joe at the gym, we will go and meet them at the gym. Or maybe we have to be at the library everyday at 6 pm so we can make sure to get in an hour of studying.

After we do these things for a week or two it seems like old hat. We just do them without even thinking about it. It’s kinda like getting the mail. You can get the mail anytime after it’s delivered but I’m willing to bet that you get the mail at about the same time everyday. It’s just become routine.

That’s the way you should make your blogging if you want to blog more efficiently. If every morning you get up and turn  on your computer and write a small three paragraph blurb about whatever you niche is about, eventually it will become part of your daily routine.

This is a really easy way you can always have your blogging part of your day. Eventually it will seem as simple as getting the mail.

Looking for something to blog about? Look no further than the daily news.

Sometimes if you’re in a blogging rut you just need a little primer to get those blogging juices going. You can sit in front of a blank wordpress “write post” page or you can head over to Honolulu Marathon. From there ideas started flowing about marathon training, marathon runners, how old to too old to run a marathon, how young is too young to run a marathon. The ideas just flowed from the headlines.

If you actually click through and read the news articles even more ideas can flow. I could just do a quick list of the last five winners of the Honolulu Marathon. Or I could do a quick little these are the top 5 times for the marathon ever. See the ideas just flow after you get a little primer.

The news, especially a large group of news articles like search engines provide. Is a great way to do it.

You may have started off in the wide world of blogging at a free blog host such as Blogger or Wordpress where you were given a subdomain of their main site. It looked something like http://youblogname.blogspot.com.

Those are great services to get your blogging skills off to a start and you may even keep your blog there. But if you want to establish your own piece of internet real estate rather than renting space from somewhere else you may want to get your very own domain.

Getting a domain name couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is Google the words “domain name” and up pops hundreds of places you can buy domains from. Many have hosting options you can choose from but that’s for another article. If you’re just looking to secure your domain name of choice, don’t worry about hosting for right now. You can always re-direct or upgrade your account through your registrar later.

The registrar is the company you register your domain through and the company that you manage your domain options through. I find that GoDaddy works really well for registering domains even though some people don’t like the Goliath and there are definitely cheaper places out there.

All you have to do to register through a company like GoDaddy is sign-up for a free account which just takes filling in some information like your address, your name, your blah blah blah. Then you search to see if the domain you want is taken and if it isn’t then you register it. Go through the steps, choose your registration length, private or public, and any other options they throw at you. If you’re at GoDaddy you’ll notice that they throw a ton of options at you, just choose quick register and be done with it.

Finally all you have to do is pay for it. You can use a credit card, and some places are even letting you use paypal to easily pay with a paypal account. And now with Google announcing no fee Google Checkout we imagine that a lot of places will try and make the switch to save in the coming year.

You’re done, you now own a unique domain name that you can call your own.

Most of us can remember at one point or another getting or hearing of a chain-letter. One of those letters where if you write this out 5 times, or make 5 copies of this and pass it on to 5 of your friends you’ll have something great happen to you.

They were all the rage when I was in middle school, then fell out of popularity in high school, and then back into popularity with the email blockbuster about how Microsoft would send you some crazy amount of money for every person in your in box you told about some letter going around that really didn’t even mention a product. That one always intrigued me, but come on, did anybody believe it? Some lawyer from Texas was quoted in it so we should all believe it. Do people believe lawyers in the first place?

Anyway, an new form of chain-letter has surfaced with the popularity of the blogosphere. It’s basically a letter telling you to do something and then link to 5 other people that you’d like to do the same thing. One of the most recent ones I’ve taken part in is writing 5 things you didn’t know about me and then asking 5 others to do the same. Hopefully my traffic will intrigue them to see what this post is that sent visitors their way and get them to write about it.

Now that one asked for me to do something. I was to write 5 things that I thought might be interesting for people to know and then ask 5 more people to do the same. One that was started back in March was similar only it didn’t need you to do anything. It just asked you to spread the indie virus and see the links fly.

See they can be simple or complex, but the key is that it gets more bloggers involved and knowing who you are, and will hopefully return some link love back to you by giving you credit either in the person that you directly link to, or maybe 2 or 3 people down the way that actually track the links back to see who might have started the whole thing.

It’s a great way to increase awareness of you blog, become an active member of the blogosphere, and maybe get a backlink or two.

There are lots of people out there who swear by commenting as their form of advertising and marketing their blogs. They just wait for a new post on a popular blog and bam, their the first to comment and hopefully gain some attraction and traffic back to their blog.

Now as a part-time blogger you may not have all the time in the world to be both commenting and blogging, especially if you don’t know if commenting works. Does it really drive traffic back to you blog?

Yes and no. It all depends on the article, the amount of people that will read the article and the order in which your comment pops up from the top.

Some articles and blogs are better to comment on to get your blog traffic it’s plane and simple. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be active in the blogging community and stop commenting on someones blog just cause it won’t send you traffic. That’s not right, you should comment where you have opinions because comments are really to open up a community like feel and a public dialogue on the bloggers articles.

However, if you are limited in time, you should focus on new articles at popular blogs related to your content. This will get you the most traffic back to your blog and help your SEO out the most (although it’s unsure how much a link in a comment helps, if that person has no-follow disabled). If you stick to similar material blogs you’ll drive the most traffic with commenting because when a reader of that blog passes over your linked text in the comment header and sees that your blogs url as golf in it, if it’s on a golf blog, chances are the reader is looking for golf related sites. But if you’re on a knitting related blog, you might not do as well.

With little time just remember to keep it similar to your blogs topic and go for new posts on high traffic blogs. Those are the most efficient places to comment.

Often times when we are trying to loose weight or improve our physical fitness we find a friend with a similar goal and sync up our schedules so that we can motivate each other to reach out goals. If one of you doesn’t want to work out, hopefully the other will and you won’t be able to easily justify not going to the gym.

This same motivational tool can be applied to blogging. If you got into blogging chances are you like to write. But writing everyday can be grueling and most people don’t follow through with their blogs after about 3 months.

An easy way to keep yourself blogging is by finding a friend who wants to do the same thing as you, blog. Begin to read each others blogs everyday. If one of you haven’t posted during the day, send a friendly email and say”Hey, just wondering what wonderful wisdom you had to spill on us about jogging today?” Or something along those lines.

Just a friendly reminder that says, why the heck haven’t you blogged today. By having someone else there wanting to know what your going to say next, even if they don’t really care about the words, (they might not share the same passion for cross-stitching as you do) you’ll have someone to motivate you through the tough times of blogging.

Unless you don’t want your friends to know that you blog a great way to promote your blog without any extra effort is to put a link in your email signature.

If you have a blog you probably send an email at least once a day. That adds up to a lot of emails over the course of the year. If on every email you have a link back to your blog you’ll have one more link for people to click through and visit your site from.

It’s free advertising that’s subtle but effective. Of course you can be and should be selective to who you include in this form of free advertising, you might not want everyone to know your obsession with little toy trains, but every little bit of traffic helps build a more reputable blog and will help you build your readership.

Heck you might not even know that your good friend Larry has a blog of his own and might be interested in sending some of his readers traffic your way. Free promotion without any time or extra effort.

One way to keep you blogging is to think of you blog as a learning tool. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others. The process of figuring out a way to explain your topic to others helps you better understand whatever it is you’re teaching.

Sometimes though, you don’t really have anyone to listen to your teachings. That’s where a blog can be very valuable. If you think of your blog as a teaching tool you will not only learn your topic but you’ll help your blogging because you’ll think of many more topics to write about.

I’ve used sports blogs before and will use them again in this example. If you need more to write about than just reporting the latest scores from your sport, write useful tip articles to help your readers out. You’ll be building your content, building your traffic, providing something useful to your blogs readers and also learning about your topic.

 

One of the easiest ways to build traffic without spending any time promoting your blog is by utilizing the trackback, which is sometimes called the pingback.

When you write about another blogs blog post you can and should link to that post to give credit where credits due or to provide your readers with new and interesting content. If you link to a blog that has pings or trackbacks enabled you have just helped yourself out as well.

See when you link to someones post that has this feature enabled on their blog your blog will automatically ping them and then in their comments section up will pop a link back to the post your just wrote about with a little excerpt from your article. It allows readers to see what others are saying about a post and is a great way to get people back your site.

Simple yet very effective. You don’t even have to solicit those bloggers for a link exchange, the blogging software does it automatically.

Some blogs make their living by simply reporting news to people. I mean that’s essentially what a blog is. It’s just a newspaper format that anyone can use to publish their own newspaper.

But why clutter the Internet with more and more reporting type sites. People aren’t going to want to read the same story from 30 different places. It’ll get old and boring and unless you provide something new and insightful, or some naked pictures never before seen, then you are going to be stuck at a few readers a day found via random Google Searches.

If you want to make a difference on the Internet you have to provide something useful for your readers. You can do this in many ways but one great place to start is by posting not just news, but tips, reviews, insightful articles, series of tied together articles, or a service that your readers can use.

Say you’re writing about golf, a blog all about the wide world of golf. Telling people how Tiger Woods did in the last tournament is nice but I can imagine that a lot of blogs and news sources will be doing the same thing. You can of course report this because doing so will provide your readers with the news, but if you follow that article up with one on how to read a putt, your readers are more likely to return to your page. You provided them with the news they were seeking about the weekends tournaments and you helped them improve their golf game.

Here are a few broad ideas that should help you think of something to write about to provide something useful.

1. Niche Specific Tip Articles
2. List of Useful Sites
3. Design Niche Relate Blog Template (more for programming savvy persons but really helps get your name out there)
4. Witty Stories Related to your Niche
5. Report on the Numbers of your Niche, Statistics, People Like Numbers